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ABOUT PHILADELPHIA

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Garland L. Thompson is new at The Philadelphia Tribune, but his voice could be that of the crusading editor who founded the thrice-weekly newspaper here 100 years ago.

''The Tribune tries to articulate the needs and interests of the black community and celebrate the achievements of blacks,'' said Mr. Thompson, who joined the newspaper seven months ago as executive editor.

One of those achievements now being celebrated by the newspaper and its 60-member staff is the survival of The Tribune itself, the country's oldest continuously published black newspaper, through a century of struggle.

Implicit in that celebration, its executives say, is the promise reflected in an expanding circulation and a $1 million improvement program. The improvements include a modern press and computers for processes from the writing of its articles to the setting of its type.

The newspaper, it seems clear, has come a long way from the days in 1884 when its founder, Christopher James Perry, was editor, publisher, staff and sole deliverer, distributing his product from door to door.

At the time Philadelphia had the largest black population of any Northern city, many of them refugees from hardship in the postbellum South, but it was still small. By 1890 it was 40,000, about 4 percent of the total.

By the last census that number had grown to 639,000, or 38 percent of the total. On peak circulation days Philadelphians buy 92,000 Tribunes.

Mr. Perry's young newspaper told of both achievements and injustices. It deplored discrimination and excoriated officials detected in chicanery. It told of jobs lost by Philadelphia blacks to a flood of European immigrants who were pouring into the city with little besides a willingness to work for whatever pay they could get, and it reported lynchings.

But its issue of Sept. 29, 1894, one of the few surviving from the newspaper's first decade, also told of ''Gen. T. Morris Chester, the eminent Negro barrister,'' who, it said, ''is the only American lawyer who can practice before a court in England.''

The newspaper's centennial issue, which was published Friday, bore a certain similarity. It reported the award of a cable television franchise to a black-owned company and a black man's charges that ''suspicious'' circumstances surrounded the death of his son, shot by a police officer in an arrest.

Friday seemed as good a time as any for the centennial issue, for no one seems to know for sure the exact date of Mr. Perry's first issue, though some accounts have listed it variously as Nov. 25 or Nov. 28. The problem is, the special issue said, that the early newspapers were published on Saturdays, and neither of those dates fell on Saturday in 1884.

Mr. Perry published his first issues in offices where The Sunday Mirror, his former employer, had just folded. It was a time, wrote Ed R. Harris, a former editor, when ''carnage in the press, both black and white, was high.''

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But reports of its own affairs by The Tribune told principally of progress, including a move to a building of its own on South 16th Street, expansion into adjoining buildings, and eventually an improvement that gave the buildings a common facade with a modern design.

Officials at the newspaper, however, remember times of struggles. Bertha Godfrey, who served several Tribune presidents as secretary and is now vice president and business manager, recalls especially some difficult days for E. Washington Rhodes, who became one of the best-known Philadelphians in his 50 years as editor and publisher.

''There were times when we had problems with the payroll,'' she recalled. ''And I can remember when the boss would take money out of his own pocket to make sure all the workers got paid.''

''He was too proud to borrow at the bank,'' she said, ''but there was a doctor he borrowed from several times to make the payroll.''

Robert W. Bogle, executive vice president of The Tribune, who serves in a post similar to one held by his father, John D. Bogle, remembers a more troubling time. It came in 1974, when the newspaper's old press suddenly expired in the midst of a run. Still, he said, The Tribune did not miss an issue. He found a newspaper in Montgomery County that agreed to complete The Tribune's printing.

There were also problems of a different nature. The newspaper itself, Mr. Bogle remembers, was often subjected to the sort of discrimination it described in its news accounts, and he remembers hearing his father complain of ''lack of equality and lack of access to the marketplace.''

Mr. Bogle still appears to seethe when he displays a letter his father once received from a department store executive. It was a message rejecting an appeal for advertisements. The store feared, the executive said, that advertising in The Tribune ''would offend a lot of good people.''

There were times, he recalled, when newsstands refused to accept The Tribune. Now, he said, some of those same stands accept it but refuse to display it.